Farm Tour - Garden

A friend of ours recently showcased her garden on her blog, and inspired me to do the same. I thought I'd start a short series picture tour of our farm, so I'll post other aspects of it later. (By the way Nola, if you're reading this, I would love to get a photo tour of your farm as well as I'm sure I'll never see all of it.

The place we put our garden was an old emu pen that was erected by some previous owner. According to my neighbors, they used to have upwards of 100 emus on this property. The entire fenced area is 40' X 148'. It was completely overgrown with weeds and small mesquite trees when we moved in, and it was a lot of hard work to get it prepared. Needless to say, we have a major weed problem in our beds. It will be years before the perennial weeds are under control. For now we just try to stay ahead of them.

The large pen was seperated into two smaller pens by a fence down the middle. We cut down sections of it to plant climbing veggies like peas and beans. It has worked out perfectly. This picture is of the the right side and you can see the middle fence on the left. The shed at the end was the emu's shelter, but makes a perfect garden shed too. We have tilled 9 seperate beds in this half.


This is the left side of the garden with the middle fence on the right. In the foreground is a sand box we put up for the kids. We spend enough time in the garden that they needed a place to play while we worked. As they get older, they'll transition from playing to helping with the work. We also have 9 tilled beds in this section. We let some of the bigger mesquite trees continue growing in this section to provide a bit of shade for us and the kids.


This is our strawberry bed. They are perennial strawberries that should come back every year. We added straw around them to keep down weeds and keep them from sitting in water after a rain.

This is a picture of some of our first potato plants coming up. The other green stuff in there is the weeds that grow in the paths. We have to constantly keep it mowed or they'll bloom and produce seeds.

Here are some of our peas growing up the middle fence. Some rabbits got into our garden and knocked some back before we could plug the holes they were getting in through, but they're doing fine now.

This is one of two raised beds we have. We eventually want them all to be raised beds because it really helps keep down weeds and helps standing moisture drain away.

Here's some of our lettuce.

Our garlic.
Onions

This is the other raised bed. It is Regina's herb bed and she is in the process of weeding and filling it with cooking and medicinal herbs.

This is some of her comfrey, which is an excellent healing herb. It grows pervasively, which is good because the cows love it.

Lastly, this is our mountain of manure/compost. We collected so much over the winter that it has quite obviously spilled out of the compost bins I built. We get about a wheelbarrow full of manure everyday, just from cleaning out the barn. If anyone wants any, just let us know.

That's the garden.